


The Same Coin

by Alceriniel



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Backstory Filler Headcannon, F/M, Gen, Pre-Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-24
Updated: 2015-11-24
Packaged: 2018-05-03 03:24:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5274728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alceriniel/pseuds/Alceriniel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He didn't feel like his stomach was being ripped out whenever he thought of her anymore. But sometimes when he thought of her unawares, it could feel like a punch to the gut. Slowly, he reached into his pocket and wrapped his fingers tightly around the wooden toy soldier he always kept there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Same Coin

"You said you lived on a farm."

MacCready raised his eyebrows at her in quiet bafflement. Not quite putting the words together for a moment. It was early morning after all and - _goddamn it_ \- that box of sugar bombs had somehow managed to wriggle its way down to the very bottom of his pack. A pack that was, by the way, filled with thirteen tons of metric _shit_ that somebody had insisted was vitally important to the reconstruction efforts taking place at Sanctuary.

"Yeah. What of it?" He finally replied, forcing himself to keep the building annoyance out of his voice. "A lot of people live on farms."

"I just find it hard to picture is all." she replied with gentle amusement from across the small bedroom, where she had previously been keeping watch over the surrounding buildings and adjacent alley. "Farmer MacCready, tending the land and raising cattle! You have to admit, it sounds a far cry from the MacCready that I've gotten know over the past few months."

Robert's initial response was to make a rude noise and glare up at her from his spot on the floor. When she just continued quietly smiling down at him, he grumped and begrudgingly replied.

"I had a family to take care of, remember? Farming is usually a heck of a lot safer than trying to wander around the Capital Wasteland with a kid in tow, besides…" he cleared his throat. "I didn't want to risk Duncan ending up like me. I wanted him to have a semi-normal life, surrounded by good people and not having to hope that enough folks needed a bullet in the brain so that you can afford your next meal." She nodded absently, as though that was the most common response that she would have expected, and went back to looking out the window again for a short while.

Thinking that she was done interrogating him, Robert went back to digging through his pack, strewing all manner of brick-a-brack bullshit around him in a semi-circle on the floor. He thought he was only around six feet of crap from the bottom of his pack when she piped up again.

"But you left?" the question hung in the air for a moment before she continued. "You were traveling with them, why did you leave?" Robert sighed and rubbed the back of his hand across his forehead, trying to quell his annoyance.

 _What made you so goddamned chatty today?_ He thought to himself ruefully.

"I lived on the farm with Duncan after what had happened with Lucy. Before that we lived in Rivet City. Lucy made a living as something like a doctor, while I did the odd job here and there. Occasionally if there wasn't any other alternative I would hire myself out as a bodyguard for a traveling caravan.

"When Lucy got pregnant we decided it would be best move out to a farm and away from the city, eventually heard about a small settlement that needed more people to come out and handle the farmland, so we decided to give it a go. We were on our way there when…" he trailed off.

"It happened." she finished for him softly, and then narrowed her eyes as she made a realization. "How old was Duncan at the time?"

"About 6 months old." Mac looked into his pack for a long moment, he hadn't even realized that he had stopped digging through it. Looking into the darkness of the pack almost sent him back there again - running through the metro station, clutching Duncan as tight as he could to his chest and his sniper rifle slung over his shoulder - all the supplies had been abandoned with Lucy. In his blind panic he hadn't even thought to grab anything else.

He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, and without realizing it, reached into his pocket and squeezed the object that he kept there at all times. Trying to remind himself that he wasn't there anymore. That the fucking metro station was over a month's travel away from where he was now. The Boss seemed to sense that she had brushed against a memory that was still a bit too raw, and attempted to change the subject away from that particular memory.

"You don't need to continue Mac." she said quietly, attempting to close the subject. But MacCready couldn't maneuver  his mind away from the memory of seeing his wife - a woman he had known _literally his entire goddamned life_ ripped apart in front of his eyes, in front of their son's…

"I found a caravan once I left the city." He finally managed to continue. "They had a Brahmin that was producing milk. I was able to feed Duncan that way but…" he clinched his hands into fists as tightly as he could for a moment, and finally released them before continuing.

"I thought he was going to die. I didn't have any food for him, everything had been left behind at the metro station when I ran, and he wouldn't stop crying. I… I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to comfort him. I had held him before sure, even sung him a lullaby, but Lucy was always the one who knew exactly what he needed. He cried so much that I was terrified that the ghouls or raiders would hear him. By the time I found the caravan he was so weak that I was sure that it didn't matter anymore, that he was so far gone that he wasn't going to make it."

He squeezed his hands and eyes shut as the memories washed over him in a choking wave. Hiding in abandoned buildings too dangerous even for raiders to squat in, trying desperately to quiet the small black-haired baby as best as he could. Begging and pleading with him to be quiet, promising him that Daddy would make everything better, just be quiet so he could find something to feed him.

He vividly remembered huddling around Duncan's tiny body once the baby had cried so hard he finally gave up and just fell asleep, clinging to the small infant as though he were a life raft and he was stranded in the middle of the ocean. Knowing that his tiny cries were becoming weaker and weaker and that there was absolutely nothing that he could do about it.

He could hear the sound of his tear-stained voice begging, praying to anything that was out there to please, please not take his son. Not the only part of Lucy that he had left.

A hand gently touching his shoulder snapped him back to reality so fast he almost forgot where he was, and before he realized it he was staring directly into Boss' eyes. Eyes that were filled with an emotion somewhere between affection and heartbreak.

"But you made it." She said simply, sternly. "You saved him."

"It was Daisy's caravan." he managed to squeeze out a small grin. "This was before she had really set up shop in Goodneighbor. The other merchants wanted me to leave. But she wouldn't have it. She took us in and cooed over Duncan like he was her very own North frickin' star.

"Eventually she told me I could stay with her group, and if I knew how to use that rifle I was lugging about, that I could get some caps from it too. She mentioned that she was headed to the Boston area, but the farm I had been headed to wasn't too far out of her way." he smiled fondly at that memory. "We continued to send letters after she dropped us off. That’s how I originally knew to come to Goodneighbor, when I arrived, she was the one that introduced me to Handcock, and helped get the word out that I was a damn good shot as well. I owe her a debt that I can never repay."

"And then you were a farmer? Until Duncan fell ill?"

"Yeah. And then I was a farmer." That at least, was a memory he could laugh at. He had no idea what he had been thinking when he agreed to head out to that farmstead, he knew absolutely jack shit about making things grow from the dirt. He was originally so terrible at it that the other settlers eventually had to take him aside and explain exactly how seeds were even supposed to be planted.

Eventually the locals had realized that not only could  he read and write, but also knew a fair bit about history and the geography of the commonwealth - thanks in no small part to the holotape archive that he had access to back at Little Lamplight - and asked him to focus less on his horrible excuse for a farm and instead work on teaching their kids their letters & numbers.  Being the town's only real teacher had made him quite an asset, and eventually he came to feel at home there.

"How old were you when all of that happened?" She asked with slight wonder in her voice.

"Nineteen. I had just turned Nineteen."

"Nineteen." she echoed him softly, breaking eye contact and looking down at her own hands. "That is a short time to have started over a third time: Mayor of Little Lamplight, married man & father, and then a farmer. Now you are on your fourth life - hired gun for a woman who can't stop wallowing in self-pity over having to start over once." she looked back up at him. "You must think I'm absolutely pathetic." she let out a hollow bark of a laugh and sat back on her ankles, so that they were now practically knee to knee on the floor.

"Lost her husband and misplaced her son.  Can't stop reminiscing over everything that has changed since she woke up." she narrowed her eyes. "Did you know, for quite a while after I first woke up, I wondered why I shouldn't just crawl back into that damned chamber and re-freeze myself." she chucked to herself. "Is it me, or do children have a way of keeping us going, even when all we want to do is lay down and let the ceiling cave in on us?"

Slowly, delicately, she reached down and ran her thumb along the wedding band that still circled her finger. It was something that she did whenever she needed to turn her thoughts inward. At one point, after several drinks, she had explained that it was a coping mechanism of hers. She did it whenever she needed to pull from the memory of her late husband for strength when she felt like her own wasn't quite enough. It was one of the few tells that MacCready knew she had.

"I don't think you are pathetic boss." he finally said after the silence had stretched on for a little too long. "Pain makes us do things that we wouldn't normally do and I think…" he paused for a moment, introspection and sympathy weren't really his things, and he had stretched himself well past his limit. "I think you are doing the best you can, and your best is a damn good job."

"You really think so?" Her voice sounded so small, and he realized at that moment how vulnerable she was allowing herself to be to him, just like he had allowed himself to be towards her just a moment ago. He wasn't quite sure what to make of that just yet, and quite frankly it made him a bit uncomfortable.

So he did what he did best. He cleared his throat and attempted to end the conversation.

"Yeah. I really do. Not that my opinion means much anyway." He started stuffing things back into his pack, Sugar Bombs long forgotten in the junk filled abyss that was this black hole of a goddamned backpack.

"That means a lot to me Bobby, er… MacCready." she paused and cleared her throat, her voice back to her normal no-nonsense tone. "Thank you." She carefully picked herself up off the floor and dusted at her pants, and walked over to her pack and began awkwardly rifling through it in an attempt to appear as busy as he was.

He pretended not to watch her, but from the corner of his eye the rising sun seemed to halo her as she rifled through her pack, and in that moment all of the scars, burn marks, and dirt from their travels seemed to buff away, leaving her looking almost alien in her pristineness.

It reminded him of the woman Lucy kept talking about when they were kids, someone she called the 'Divine Mother', a lady who apparently gave birth to some guy that used to be a big deal. Lucy lit a candle to her because that is what her parents did before they had died and she found her way to Little Lamplight.

 _Lucy_.

He didn't feel like his stomach was being ripped out whenever he thought of her anymore. But sometimes when he thought of her unawares, it could feel like a punch to the gut. Slowly, he reached into his pocket and wrapped his fingers tightly around the wooden toy soldier he always kept there.

**Author's Note:**

> I gave up trying to edit half way through because I was too tired. I hope someone likes it at least.
> 
> Other Notes: 
> 
> 1.) I tried to keep the F!Sole Survivor as open-ended as possible to fit everyone's version of her, sorry if that flopped.
> 
> 2.) If anyone is wondering why Duncan's hair is black, it is because his mother, Lucy was of Hispanic heritage and had black hair, and I wanted Duncan to have some traits that resembled his mother.


End file.
